"Nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? If you hadn't written it, I should never have been here." "That's why, then, isn't it?" "I suppose so. You _had_ to write it, and I _had_ to come." "Yes, Owen," she said gently. "You brought me here," he said. "I can't understand it." "Can't understand what?" "The fascination I had for you." He closed the book and laid it down. "You were my youth, Nina." He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that forbade her to touch him. "My youth was dumb. It couldn't make itself immortal. You did that for it." "But the people of those tales are not a bit like you." "No. They _are_ me. They are what I was. Your people are not people, they are not characters, they are incarnate passions." "So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony. "You don't know me. You don't remember me. But I know and remember you. You asked me once how I knew. That's how. I've been where you were." He paused. "If my youth were here, Nina, it would be at your feet. As it is, it rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like an unhappy ghost." It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him. Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood. She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say. He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him. She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow. Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat. He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to between them. She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart. At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all passion of flesh and blood.